Una casa en Sicilia

Italy, the 1950s. Luisa, a young Tuscan woman, travels south to meet her eccentric in-laws: a Prefect of the Republic, terrified by the obligations of his office, and his wife, obsessed with drafts. They live with a dog they treat like a daughter and Concetta, a widowed maid who talks a mile a minute and misses nothing. Our protagonist arrives with the hope of someone who believes Mussolini's defeat will bring about a moral transformation, but what she finds is a southern society that has found in bureaucracy a way of inhabiting the world. And then there is Sicily: the estate at the foot of Mount Etna where the Prefect dreams of retiring, the vineyards and prickly pear cacti, the dialect mixed with Italian, the gray sea bisected by a lizard-green strip. A land that is also a self-contained world with its own laws, squabbles, silences, and a perfect impermeability to history. With humor, intelligence and a touch of nostalgia, this autobiographical novel achieves something that Italian literature had previously avoided: portraying the weight of institutions in everyday life.